The issues promise to center more about candidates than platforms. Parties will impress us more as election machinery than as vehicles of any really fundamental ideals and program. We shall probably have three measures of preparedness from which to choose. There will be a sincere, genuine program of preparedness, including international duty, Americanism, and preparation at home carried by the Republicans, to fit its candidate, and probably indorsed by the Progressives. There will be a milder course, a kind of middle-of-the-road preparedness carried by the Democrats, in the hope of holding their own. The indications are now that there will be a third party of pacifists, anti-preparedness at most points, which will include the ultra-contented, the discontented, and a considerable socialist and labor following. Each platform will doubtless carry some planks dealing with “pressing national questions” as ballast, but few voters will consider them seriously. The main issue of preparedness will determine the lines of the vote, because America now knows that all of its internal progress and “reform” depend upon an America that can defend itself. Belgium drove that lesson home. Through the intricate paths of American honor, international duty, adequate preparedness, national service, universal training, Mexican strategy, the American voter must wend his way. He will be beset at every turn by the “record of the administration and of Congress,” interpreted first one way and then another by the propaganda of defense organizations and of their opponents. He will be deluged with accurate and inaccurate information, from which he will find it difficult to select the best. He will be bombarded with literature, and enticed to meetings and will be given promises hard to keep in 1917. Within the next few months he will receive more gratuitous condensed education on all these questions than during the entire time since 1912. In addition to all this confusion of mind and competitive struggle, prevailing about the native-born voter, the foreign-born voter will be torn by loyalties and sympathies which go back many generations to the fatherland. Most of them have some one dear to them at the front or lying dead on some battle field. Their mail is censored and they often do not know who is dead and who is living or what has happened to their little homestead in the old country. They see ammunition going out of America, not to fight their battles, but to kill some of their countrymen. They see America growing rich from this manufacture. They are only waiting the first assurance of peace to go back and see what has happened or to help their home country.